[[geometry:circle]]

The Circle: 1, Unity

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The most fundamental of shapes, the circle is perfection—every point on it is exactly the same distance from the center, giving it total symmetry—and completion, since it has no beginning and no end. As the latter, it encompasses all things cyclical (for example, the Wheel of the Year observed by many pagans), as the very term “cycle” implies.

Circles describe our most primal landscape: the sun, the full moon, and the horizon taken in all directions. What’s more, no other shape can do so much with so little: Take a string of any length, and by making a circle out of it you will enclose the greatest amount of surface (area), more than any other shape. So the circle is therefore symbolically all-encompassing.

For all these reasons, the circle is generally recognized as a symbol of the divine in its totality, of spirit, and of unity. It represents the transcendent in its purest form, undifferentiated and unmanifest in the mundane world. No wonder that Wiccans and related paths create sacred space by casting a circle.

It should also come as no surprise, then, that the circle yields the first of the “special numbers” of sacred geometry, one of the most important and certainly the most famous of all the unchanging numbers (constants) in mathematics: pi.

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The Greek letter “pi” is shorthand for how the circumference (the outer edge; the circle itself) of a circle measures up against its diameter (a straight line drawn across the circle through its center). No matter how big or small the circle, if you measure the diameter and multiply it by pi, you get the circumference of that circle.

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In our ever-changing universe, there aren’t many constants, so when you run into one, it suggests you’ve uncovered something profound about the workings of our universe. It’s compelling that the most fundamental of shapes, intuitively grasped as meaningful, yields a constant. But pi isn’t just a constant; it’s an irrational number–an unusual mathematical creature–and even more unusual, it’s a transcendental number, a subset of irrational numbers of which there are only a few types. (Whenever an irrational number pops up in sacred geometry, it’s a sign that one of the mysteries of the universe lies here.)

What all this means, in part, is that the precise value of pi is unknowable. It is approximately 3.14159, but the decimal stretches on to infinity, the sequence of digits never repeating, so that, like the true nature of the divine, pi can never be fully grasped by the human mind. If the circle as the foremost symbol of the transcendent needed any validation, it doesn’t get better than that.

The 3-dimensional analogue of the circle is the sphere.

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Next–The Vesica Piscis: 2, Duality
Back to Sacred Geometry intro

  • geometry/circle.txt
  • Last modified: 2019/08/05 11:28
  • by RandallS